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Colonial Club: A Landmark in All but Name

IN the old sense of “landmark” — a guidepost so conspicuous that it becomes the emblem of an area — the former Colonial Club at the southwest corner of Broadway and 72nd Street was certainly a landmark. Its turreted corner served for more than a century as a kind of gateway to the Upper West Side.

In the modern and official sense of “landmark” — having “a special character or special historical or aesthetic interest or value as part of the development, heritage, or cultural characteristics of the city, state, or nation” — an argument could have been made for the old clubhouse.

But the Landmarks Preservation Commission was not persuaded. It declined three times to pursue designation of the ragtag six-story building. The storefronts are now empty. “I’m sorry,” says a sign at the corner deli. “We closed.” There are still office tenants upstairs, but the structure is shrouded in black netting. To judge from city permits, it will re-emerge next year with an aluminum and glass skin, without its pediments and pilasters, cornice and ornament.

In short, without its history.

And the Upper West Side will have lost a bridge to its past; not just the 19th century but indirectly the 18th century, a subject of special interest at the Colonial Club.

“One of the main objects of the club is to preserve colonial and Revolutionary relics,” E. Idell Zeisloft wrote in “The New Metropolis” (1899), a descriptive book about the city and its institutions. And what better spot for its home? “General Washington camped upon the site,” Zeisloft said.

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The Colonial Club in 1986. The clubhouse opened in 1892. The fourth-floor balcony was removed before the current work began.Credit
David W. Dunlap

This was probably something of a stretch, however. “The most that can be said of this intersection is that Washington’s forces retreated through it after the Battle of Brooklyn in 1776, on their way to Harlem Heights,” said Barnet Schecter, the author of “The Battle for New York” (2002).

Henry F. Kilburn designed the clubhouse in what contemporary accounts called colonial style. It opened in 1892. There was a billiard room overlooked by a cafe, a bowling alley, a dining room, wine cellars, a library and a ballroom. The men’s entrance was through a noble porch on Broadway. The women’s entrance, no less elegant, was on 72nd Street.

In retrospect, the club’s real distinction was its relatively enlightened attitude about women. It was “the third social club in the city to admit ladies to the privileges of its restaurant,” Zeisloft wrote. The New York Times reported in 1893, “One of the elevating purposes of the club was to enjoy the society of pure and honorable women.”

This golden age was brief. The club foundered financially. Its home was sold at auction in 1903. The interior was transformed into a warren of offices. The monumental ground floor was stripped of limestone and cut up into storefronts. The main entryway was lost. Most of the grand arched windows and round windows, or oculi, were squared off. The delicate iron balcony was removed.

All of these unsympathetic alterations must have discouraged the landmarks commission.

“We evaluated the building twice in the 1980’s (1985 and 1989), and found on both occasions that it lacked the agency’s historical and architectural criteria for designation as an individual New York City landmark,” Elisabeth de Bourbon, the commission’s spokeswoman, said in an e-mail message. “When we were approached a third time last year, we found, as part of our assessment, that the owner already had obtained permits for the work.”

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The Colonial Club building this month. City permits indicate it will re-emerge next year with an aluminum and glass skin.Credit
Marko Georgiev for The New York Times

The permits are to “remove all exterior projections including cornice and molding” and construct a “new aluminum and glass cladding facade on existing building.”

Almost certainly, the longer-term prospect is that the old clubhouse and some adjacent properties will be replaced by an apartment building.

THE Colonial Club’s future demolition will mark more than the destruction of bricks and mortar, but the eradication of a story of the roots of the Upper West Side,” said Michael Perlman, a preservationist in Queens who championed the building.

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Landmark West, a tenacious preservation group, would have been the most likely leader of a designation effort. But the Colonial Club did not appear on its landmarks wish list. Busy fighting other battles, Landmark West had little appetite for a last-minute skirmish against an owner who already had building permits.

“Since there are only 24 hours in a day, we have to have some system for prioritizing,” said Kate Wood, the executive director of Landmark West. “It breaks my heart to say anything negative about the Colonial Club, because there’s no reason it shouldn’t be a landmark, but in the scheme of things, a lot of buildings deserve to be landmarks.”

“It’s out of the landmarks realm right now,” Ms. Wood added, “much as I hate to say it.”

There is always a chance that unofficial landmarks will be replaced by undoubted landmarks. What is clear, however, is that they will keep disappearing. That is, in part, how a city grows. There are buildings — the Colonial Club is one — whose history may be valued and whose presence may be missed but whose time is simply up.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page B4 of the New York edition with the headline: Colonial Club: A Landmark in All but Name. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe